> Or are there other factors separate from the marginal cost to a professor of an additional grad student which should be included (e.g. are there institutional-level resources which are significantly supporting this workforce?)No. At least, not in CS. What sorts if things would you be referring to? Compute? Honestly you're better off with a trivial cloud grant than trying to use the slurm cluster with a dozen ancient gpus for hundreds of faculty to share. Office space? Your average dilapidated cube farm is LUXURY compared to the sardine situation grad students put up with. Robotics hardware? Doesn't really scale like that. And... those are the only three things needed for like 90% of CS research. In CS, precious few dollars other than the stipend go toward anything useful. As far as a faculty member is concerns, that money money disappears into a pit.
(What's going on is that the PhD stipend is fixed by the funding agency, and the university squeezes as much as possible away from the professor/student. Just armies upon armies of assistant deans doing not much of anything while the grad students toil away doing the only useful work in the place for rent and pizza.)
